Buying Down Risk with Preparedness and Mitigation

As the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) develops our 2018-2022 Strategic Plan, we need the input and diverse perspectives of the entire FEMA team, the stakeholders we serve, and the partners we work with every day. We need your help to inform our future vision, direction, strategic goals, and operational objectives.

The Agency is seeking feedback and engagement from our partners and stakeholders here. This is our first step in a new cycle of listening to employees at all levels, and stakeholders from state, local, tribal, and territorial governments, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector about how we could do things better.

Please feel free to comment on or discuss this topic between now and October 5, 2017.

Topic Area 2

Provide examples of how to incentivize more investment in preparedness and mitigation prior to a disaster.

Discuss the factors that should be included in calculating risk for awarding grants.

Provide examples of grants that are best suited for effectively reducing risk.

Provide examples of how the Nation, including but not limited to FEMA, can better train and credential a surge disaster workforce ahead of major disasters.

Discuss new ways to think about a true culture of preparedness.

Discuss opportunities to identify cost savings and reduce the complexity of mitigation and/or preparedness to build a more resilient nation

VOLUNTEER UTILIZATION SERIES
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CAPABILITY VIEWPOINT-9: UTILIZATION OF VOLUNTEERS SUCH AS CERT AS STATE & LOCAL EXPANSION CADRE OF ESSENTIAL PUBLIC & PRIVATE SERVICES, SEARCH & RESCUE, MEDICAL TREATMENT AND MASS CARE RESPONSES
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PURPOSE: This is part of a series of posts examining various ways volunteers such as CERT have been utilized in the past. The Volunteer Utilization Series posts were preliminarily categorized
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Voting

Please look at FEMA’s oversight of NFIP communities' enforcement of their flood damage prevention ordinances, especially following disasters. Communities agreed to enforce these ordinances in exchange for FEMA's flood insurance. Our flood insurance has historically paid for rebuilding damaged structures exactly the way they were before the damage even though our own insurance data and substantial damage technical assistance
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Voting

Why don't you suggest to all cities with low lying areas prone to flooding to put depth measurements in low lying areas. This way everyone would know how deep the water is and whether it is save to drive thru.

Voting

406 Hazard Mitigation (HM) is an under-utilized tool for buying down the nation's risk. It presents an opportunity to directly reduce known risk to public facilities at a time people are most clearly faced with the impacts of disasters and the value of mitigation. Any risk reduced with 406 HM funds also supports the mitigation of undamaged properties by increasing the cap for HMGP (404) funds. 406 HM also allows FEMA
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Recommend we invent a better process for partnering 406 and 404 Mitigation funding to provide a better service for our applicants when PA 406 funding, alone, does not properly fix the damaged facility. I have noticed two problems that seem to make this concept difficult to implement. First, the review and processing of 404 Mitigation funding applications is much more encumbered and time consuming than for the 406 Mitigation
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Voting

Perspective from a tribal diplomat / technocrat / practitioner who lives on the edge of the frontier where geological hazards abound.
Q: How should risk be calculated in awarding grants?
A: The first weighed criteria should always be frequency of an event happening again. The second weighed criteria should be financial impact of an event happening. For example: on the coast of Washington State, windstorms happen
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Voting

Standardize homeowner best practices for specific hazards and require that all insurance providers incentivize personal mitigation efforts via lower premiums. For example, credit could be awarded for bolting houses to their foundations in earthquake country, for freeboarding in areas likely to flood, etc.

Voting

It seems that HMGP takes too long to obligate. Funds are available from day 1 of the disaster but even today, obligations are still being made for Katrina disasters. If the state can't use he money, close them down and allow the programs to move on to the next disaster. There are diminishing returns of funding mitigation 10+ years after the fact. Stick to the 1 year to submit applications and 1 year for FEMA to approve
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Voting

Risk Analysis produces information that can be used to assess a flood event coming in and how it may impact key infrastructure but the tools need to be developed to link these data sources. We have developed a tool for our region that translates incoming floods to flood frequencies that helps to focus on where the incoming flood will hit the communities the hardest (i.e. where might we see something greater than the
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Voting

From a staff perspective, staff being in response and outside of grants, it appears that Grant packages are developed with FEMA assistance, but we internally do not collaborate on the applications being submitted. If we are to provide technical assistance in grant preparation, we should leverage work done in catastrophic planning and use those ideas to develop and provide grant opportunities. We also should be more
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Voting

FEMA needs a "Website Usability Specialist" to go through their websites to make sure they make sense to people who don't work for the agency!
The main FEMA website (FEMA.gov) and its subsequent disaster pages are confusing to navigate, difficult to understand, poorly laid out, and not intuitively designed for the mobile user.
On the disaster webpages for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria there are cumbersome maps
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Voting

Standard approaches to disaster preparedness and hazard mitigation often focus on a single point of failure: update this building, provide a training to meet a shortfall. Addressing preparedness in this way has a direct and recognizable impact which is most manageable for typical funding programs. This is an excellent approach for proven hazards. But when we look at buying down long term risk, are there other unexplored
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